


Thorns

by marlowe_tops



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: 00Q - Freeform, Creepy, Dark, Deception, Lies, M/M, Magic, Magical Realism, Torture, fairy curses, fairy tale themes, rape themes, sleeping beauty themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:54:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marlowe_tops/pseuds/marlowe_tops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond enters a ring of thorns in a cursed patch of Northern England in order to break the spell, only to find himself drawn to a sorcerer named Q who has far too many secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day One

**Author's Note:**

> Please be warned, this story has some very dark and painful elements. There is a torture scene and some fairly explicit references to rape. If you're a Silva shipper, please note that he will not herein be painted with a flattering brush.
> 
> Story will update once or twice a week. I write fast, have never left an unfinished WIP, and I have a habit of updating more often than I say I will. :)
> 
> My thanks to Relia for her help with the plot and her unwavering faith in me.

Bond left his car in a patch of sunlight.

The sun hung low above the winter-bare black trees of Northern England, crisping on the papery edges of the last few leaves frozen onto branches. It gilded the thatched roofs of the little town where he left his car and watched over the empty, evacuated houses. Even the animals were gone. Not even a raven remained to scold him for coming. Bond was alone with the sun and the creeping fog.

He knew his car wouldn’t be safe here. Not for long. Every day the fog crept a little wider.

The reports they’d received called it the _thorns_ , not the fog, although the fog was all anyone could see of it. Every day it ate a little more of England, spreading like a cancer and devouring anything that was caught within. Two special forces teams; a helicopter; three towns; and a swathe of mostly-uninhabited Northern England. All of them had gone into the thorns; and then nothing.

Taking a machete, a torch and his gun, Bond patted the hood of his car in fond farewell and climbed the hill.

The fog locked the world in perpetual twilight, reducing Bond’s vision to a scarce few metres in all directions. And once he was within it, it began to speak to him.

 _Are you coming to join us?_ it whispered. _We’d love to have you. Come in, little man. The kettle’s just boiled._

Bond hefted his machete lightly in his hand, and kept walking.

The fog and the thorns could not be burned. Could not be bombed. Could not be cut down or torn up. 

They had evacuated the area, sent men with guns and chemicals, and sent more when the first failed to return. They suppressed news reports and panic, although the internet exploded with hazy pictures of a vast wall of thorns in a sea of fog, along with the advice never to touch the thorns. If they begin to grow, run. 

It wasn’t far. Only just far enough to let the warmth of the sunny day leech away, replaced by the damp, cutting chill of fog. Bond felt his coat growing heavy as the fog clutched at it, sinking tiny droplets into the felt. He was warm and dry now. After twenty minutes, he would begin to feel the edge of the cold. Two or three hours in this weather would see his thick wool coat soaked through. 

There were towns inside the thorns, and shelter; or, at least, there had once been towns in the place on the map now occupied by a malevolent wall of thorns. Now, he had no idea what to expect, nor any reason to believe that he would return from this mission alive. 

_Go on, Bond._ M had said. _See what you can do._

 _Is this my retirement?_ he’d asked, jokingly. Two special forces teams and a helicopter; bombs and chemicals. This was all they had left to try: one man alone.

_Here’s a torch and a machete. Anything else you need?_

_Hedge-trimming, is that it? And here I thought I was a spy._

The thorns rose up in front of him in a solid wall. Branches as thick as his arm bared thorns as long as his thumb. They disappeared into the fog high above him and in either direction. He had no reason to believe that there would be a break in the hedge, and he knew that it went on for miles. Looking for an access point would be a waste of time.

His machete was a hefty thing, new metal freshly sharpened. He slashed an X into the hedge, cutting smoothly through the tangle. Very sharp. Good.

Shivering like a thing alive, the hedge quivered and shifted. The severed limbs littered the sedge at his feet, dead and dripping white ichor from black thorns. Slowly, as he watched, the hedge filled in the hole, healing completely within minutes. All the while it grew, the whole thing expanding outward a few inches at a time. 

The whole thing terrified him. He was accustomed to the straightforward and comprehensible problems of human corruption and human deception. This was something _other_. Something impossible, that he’d never been trained to fight. How do you combat _fog_?

Lifting his torch, Bond shone it into the hedge, trying to see a little farther into the black tangle. No hint of light on the other side. If there was another side, and not just an eternal wall of thorns several miles wide. Here and there were patches of pale flesh from bodies trapped in the thorns. Dead, if there was any mercy in the world. Soon to be joined by one more stubborn idiot just following orders.

“Should have brought a chainsaw,” Bond said, the sound of his own voice making the fog seem a little less horribly silent and the thorns a little less deadly.

It was slow going. He had to keep a wide enough space on all sides that he could continue to wield the machete, while the thorns slithered constantly around him, clutching at the wool of his coat. Pressing constantly forward, he cut into the hedge, tromping the thorns beneath his boots and trying to ignore the way they _twitched_ underfoot.

 _What a brave little soldier you are,_ the fog whispered. _In such a hurry to get inside. Are you coming to rescue me? Come on then, my brave knight. Rescue me._

He ignored the voices in the fog. Let them think he couldn’t hear, and that it didn’t make his nerves itch. He let his mind speculate on the sort of technology that could create several miles of persistent fog, a vast and hostile wall of thorns, and psychic whispers in his ear. Something like cloud-seeding, something like carnivorous kudzu, and something like sound projection, that was all. Now he just needed the latest from Q branch to match: a glowing sword to cut through the thorns and a vial of sunlight to burn away the fog.

The hedge healed itself behind him, closing up the hole he’d made. Within minutes, he was completely enclosed, with nothing but his machete and his torch to defend him. If the hedge didn’t end before his arm began to tire, he would die here. Twice, he had to stop to rest, for moments at a time. More times than he liked to count, he had to curve his path around a body in the thorns.

The bodies were whole and seemingly undamaged. Some of them faced in his direction, their dead, fogged eyes watching him toil. It made his skin crawl.

When his right arm grew tired, he moved the machete to his left, although it meant he cut slower and with less accuracy. Even if there was a far side, he had lost all sense of direction. He might be going in circles, carving his way into his own tomb. 

Both his arms ached by the time he saw light through the thorns. Legs stumbling, he blinked at the haze of fog becoming visible again, and turned off the torch to make certain. There was light, if only the hazy, cold light of the fog. 

_Still alive. How you do impress me, my little knight. Have you come to break the curse?_

On the far side of the thorns—he knew it was, indeed, the far side of the thorns only by the curvature of the thorn wall, and the way that it grew in retreat, inch by inch, as it widened out into England—the fog thinned, until it was merely a hazy, cloudy day. 

It looked like Northern England. Must be late afternoon, given the time he’d entered the hedge. When he checked his watch, he found it dead. The landscape was undamaged by the wall of thorns that had slowly bulldozed over it, except for a few remaining patches of thorns. Bond headed straight for the center of the thorn ring, having no better clue about where to start. 

This part of the country was sparsely populated to begin with, and all the remnants had been devoured by thorns. Bond passed more than one farmhouse that was entirely engulfed, and one village that had received the same treatment. It made the thorns seem more actively hostile. They had left the landscape untouched, but all of the people they caught, they kept. 

Except for him. 

The reports of the thorns said _run_. And yet, Bond could have walked away from the hedge without being caught. Even carving his way through the thorns, they’d done nothing but slither ominously. Machete or no, they didn’t seem like the same thorns that had sprung up and trapped these people before they could escape, or the same thorns that needed to be outrun.

He kept his machete at hand, walking alone through the bleak landscape. The fog was quiet now, leaving off the taunts or encouragement that had come before. Sometimes he could see the inhabitants of the houses, all of them dead and bloodless, tangled in black thorns. But here, inside the wall, the thorns were still and quiet. They’d already caught their prey. Now they slept, as still and slow as ordinary plants. 

_Digesting?_ he wondered, and then quickly decided not to dwell upon the possibility. He was here and alive. His mission was to find the source of this and put a stop to it. 

The first movement he saw was of a man dragging a dead body.

He dropped to his knees at the sight, ducking out of view behind a hillock for a moment as he took stock and switched his machete for his gun. Someone was alive within this cursed thorn cage? Perpetrator, or victim?

The man was dark-haired and slender, struggling to lift the body of a man larger than he was. It was an almost impossible task for him, and he was forced to frequently change the way he was trying to carry the body. He got it over his shoulder for a fireman’s carry and staggered along like that for a few steps before he tripped and fell, dropping the body and checking it worriedly for damage before he got a shoulder under its arms and carried it like that for a few more steps, the boots of the dead man dragging along behind him.

Bond rose again upon seeing him check the body for damage. Not dead, then, only injured? He treated it like a human body, not just a weight to be transported. If he’d cared less about his cargo, he could have simply dragged it along the ground. So, either the live stranger still thought of his burden as a person, or he had some other reason to care about transporting it in good condition. Bond didn’t feel inclined to give him too much faith about his intentions. This place made him paranoid, and he couldn’t think of a reason why this man would have survived intact unless he had something to do with the curse.

Gun down but kept in front of him, Bond approached quietly. He was plainly visible, even in the light fog, but the stranger was too occupied with the body and wasn’t keeping a watch for other people. With good reason, given that no one else seemed to have survived.

Bond was fifteen feet away before the dark-haired man saw him and dropped his burden in shock.

Cursing, he dropped immediately to his knees, checking the dead man’s head for damage before returning his attention to Bond.

“You,” he stammered, out of breath and exhausted. “Who are you— _what_ are you…?” He was scrawny, his dark hair a curly mop on his head, and half of his face taken up with large glasses. There was something immediately, awkwardly adorable about him, like a perpetual university scholar who had somehow made his escape from his home college, only to find himself in the wilds of Northern England amidst the thorns and the dead.

“Bond,” he said, keeping his gun aimed at the ground a few feet in front of the stranger. Aggressive but not openly confrontational. “James Bond.”

The maybe-scholar stared at him. “How did you get in?”

So, none of the special forces men had made it all the way in. If they had, this man—boy? he couldn’t be over thirty—wouldn’t be so surprised to see one man alive.

Familiarity itched at Bond’s brain. The longer he looked, the more certain he felt that he’d met this man before, in passing. He felt comfortably familiar, like a sense of deja vu for a cozy fireplace.

“Machete,” Bond said, not giving more details than necessary. “You?”

He frowned, shoulders tugging back and chin tucking down. Defensive. Scared, maybe. “I didn’t.”

That could mean anything. Bond motioned with his gun toward the body. “What about him?”

The stranger bristled, chin coming back up with pride. “His name is John Wilsker. He lives near here.”

Bond lowered his gun, set the safety, and tucked it into his waistband. Whatever this kid intended to do with the body, he was apparently possessed of the notion that John Wilsker was not dead, and would any day now be returning to his normal life. Normally, Bond would be more inclined to disabuse him of the notion, but here and now he couldn’t be sure. The bodies he’d seen should be in worse condition, given that they’d spent at least a few days in the elements. But not one of them had begun to rot. Every one he’d seen looked no more than a few hours cold.

“And you are?” Bond asked.

The kid narrowed his eyes at him, as though that was a very suspicious question with clear ulterior motives. “Q,” he said at last. “Call me Q.”

“Q,” Bond repeated. If the weird kid in accursed Northumberland didn’t want to provide his name, Bond didn’t really have basis for considering that strange. Not compared to the thorns and the not-quite-dead bodies. “Need any help with that?”

Q looked from bond to the body in consternation, caught between polite refusal and his actual desperate need for help. Not waiting for a decision, Bond slung the body over his shoulder. “Where to?”

Staring at him for a moment, Q pulled himself together. Relieved of his burden, Q held himself with a reserved—almost prim—politeness. Young though he was, someone had trained him with old-fashioned British manners. He was simply but expensively dressed—sweater vest, tie, and trousers, all of excellent quality, if not to Bond’s taste. It gave him an air of mingled youth and tradition, tangled up together beneath the supervision of an eccentric genius.

“You can’t or won’t tell me your name or how you got here,” Bond said. He was here to fix this curse, and Q was his only source for information. “What _can_ you tell me?”

“I can tell you that the area is under a fairy curse, and that I have genuinely no idea how to break it.” It was the first question Q had answered without deflection.

“Fairies.”

“Fairy magic,” Q corrected, straightforward with what information he could give. “Different from nature magic, alchemy, or elemental sorcery.”

“‘Magic’ isn’t enough?” Bond asked, a wisp of amusement in his voice. “You have to have different sorts?”

“There are different sorts of science,” Q pointed out.

“Science is tangible.”

“Yes. Predictable. Reliable. Magic isn’t, generally.”

“You’ll forgive me if I prefer to think of this as science that I just don’t understand yet.”

“Yes, well.” Q glanced over at him with a hint of a smile. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Mr. Bond.”

Bond couldn’t resist the tug at the corners of his lips. “There is nothing wrong with my philosophy.”

Both of them had been headed in the same direction, toward the center of the thorn ring. Bond made no comment on the subject, and he knew to suspect that distances might be as unnaturally muddled with the curse as were time, the weather and death, but he calculated that they were very nearly to the dead center of the ring when they crested a hill and came upon a lonely, desolate stone manor with a little stone church huddled nearby.

They headed for the church.

“You know something about the magic that caused this,” Bond prompted.

“Yes. I do. I study magic.”

“Is that how you survived the thorns?”

“I can’t answer that.”

The words were delivered without emotion. No attempt to deflect or evade. Not even the stubbornness that should accompany flat refusal. It was like a computer response: _your query returned no results._

Bond tried a new approach. “What can you tell me about fairy magic?”

“Did you ever read fairy tales when you were a child? There’s always a way to break a curse. Some sort of loophole. The princess will prick her finger, but she won’t die, she’ll just sleep for a hundred years and then her one true love will climb to the tower and break the spell with a kiss. The prince will remain a beast until a pretty girl agrees to marry him. That sort of thing. I don’t suppose you’re a prince?”

“Not a prince,” Bond confirmed.

“No? Well, you’re still here. I don’t know what the loophole is. I don’t know how to break the curse. But you’re here. That’s a loophole, all on its own.” Q laid his hand on the church door, pushing it open.

“Sounds like all I have to do is kiss you.”

Glancing back over his shoulder as he stepped through into the church, Q’s smile was full and genuine this time. “It’s worth a try.”

Bond followed him inside, joking flirtation dying instantly. Q had stopped short just a few steps inside, looking guilt-stricken over at Bond as though he had only just realized what this looked like.

The church was a charnel house. Bodies sat limply in the pews, attending a silent sermon. There were more than a dozen of them, all as cold and unrotted as the bodies in the thorns.

Setting down his burden and taking out his gun again, Bond walked slowly up the aisle. Men and women, even a child. The expression of knowing guilt on Q’s face killed a measure of the trust Bond had begun to feel toward him. Q had brought the bodies here, and posed them.

“I hoped that the hallowed ground would break the spell,” Q said, vocal cords tight with stress and guilt. “Church faith against fairy magic. It works, sometimes, in the old spells. And there weren’t thorns here, at least. Except that it hasn’t worked, and I’m an atheist. But even when it didn’t work, I kept on. I brought the rest, one at a time.”

It was a good explanation, although the knowledge that Q had dragged dead bodies in here and set them upright in the pews still made his skin crawl. 

“I knew these people,” Q persisted, picking up Mr. Wilsker and dragging him to the side of the room so that he at least wasn’t slumped in the middle of the floor. He set the body neatly in a corner, folding its hands in its lap. “Some of them were my friends. I can’t just leave them in the thorns. And I don’t know what else I can do. I don’t know how to break the spell.”

~

The manor, by contrast, was cozy.

Candles sparkled and a fire roared into life as they walked through the door, like a particularly welcoming illusionist’s trick.

Bond paused, wary, but Q was completely at ease. “Don’t worry. This is all mine. I have control over almost everything in the house. It’s my realm, I suppose. We’re safe here, or at least as safe as we can get. The thorns came, once. They haven’t tried again.”

“What are you?”

“Witch, wizard, sorcerer, magician. Take your pick. I’m a scholar. I study magic. I happen to be rather good at it.” Q led him through an archway into a banquet hall with a long table, where a lavish meal was laid out. Bond had only ever seen feasts like that in movies. 

“I need to warn you,” Q said, picking up a plain apple from the elaborate display, “fairy tale rules apply here. Anything you’ve ever seen or read on fairy tales might be useful for you. The important thing right now is the fairy feast.”

Biting into the apple, Q sat, keeping his eyes on Bond. “Persephone and the pomegranate,” he said, between bites. “If you partake of food while in a fairy realm, you might become part of the story, or under the fairy’s power, and then you can’t leave. If anyone else offers you food, don’t take it. My food is safe—but of course you can’t know if I’m telling the truth.”

“Why tell me?” Bond asked. “I might have eaten, if you hadn’t warned me.”

“Because I’d rather have you hungry and distrustful than ignorantly accepting food from anyone else. You’re a loophole, and that means you’re probably part of what breaks the curse.”

Q varied so quickly from defensive and unhelpful to graciously accommodating and informative. Bond didn’t trust it, but he didn’t trust any of this. Q was just another element of the trap. An element who could light fires and provide feasts, as long as he was within his own home.

“Who else is here?”

Q held his gaze, but offered no reply.

“Who else might offer me food? You wouldn’t tell me that if you didn’t think there was someone else here. You, me, who else?”

Still nothing.

“You make it very hard to trust you,” Bond said. “Aren’t you at least going to tell me that you can’t answer it?”

“I can,” Q said, levelly. “In this case, I won’t.”

“Who? How many? What’s to keep me from trusting them instead of you?”

“You should sit down, Mr. Bond.”

Dizziness washed over him. Bond reached for a chair to lean on. “Why?” he persisted, determined to stay upright and show as little weakness as possible. “What have you done?”

He hadn’t eaten anything since he arrived. The world outside was still twilit. In or out of the thorns, it shouldn’t have been that late. He shouldn’t be this tired.

Q didn’t rise from the chair, eyes fixed on Bond.

Another wave of dizziness.

Bond reached—

 

_”Wake up.”_

_Warm and content, Bond took stock of himself. He didn’t need to open his eyes: Q’s bed, Q’s flat. Q beside him, looking down at him. He would be smiling, eyes crinkled up at the corners and mouth pulled into that easy, content smile that he only showed when they were alone._

_Q knew he was awake already. Bond let himself enjoy the pretense._

_“James, I need your help with this.”_

_“Is the world in danger again?” Bond asked. He didn’t open his eyes._

_“It might be. Wake up.”_

_Bond rolled over, pushing Q’s laptop out of the way and pinning him down._

_Q grinned indulgently. “007.”_

_“It can wait.”_

_“It can’t,” Q argued, but he let himself be kissed._

_“I had the strangest dream,” Bond said, starting to unbutton Q’s pyjama top. When had Q put on a pyjama top? Bond insisted on sleeping nude. Q must have gotten up and dressed. Why hadn’t that woken him?_

_“Did you?” Q responded. He didn’t sound very interested._

_“You were trapped in a castle in a ring of thorns—“_

_“Watched Sleeping Beauty lately?”_

_“And you were keeping a church full of corpses.”_

_“Oh, that sounds healthy.” Q batted at him. “Bond, please. No dreams, no sex. We have work to do.”_

_“Let it wait. I don’t have much time with you. We have to hurry. I have to get you somewhere safe.”_

_“You aren’t making sense. Will you look at this?” Q pushed him off, reaching for the laptop and handing it to him._

_“What am I looking at?”_

_Sitting up, Q tucked himself under Bond’s arm and took over the keyboard. “MI6 has been fighting a hacker for weeks. It seems like he’s been going after you. Tracking you. All his attacks are opening up a path to you.”_

_The screen flashed. Q lifted his hands in surprise. Flooding with white, the screen was blank but for a blinking black cursor._

Good morning, Prince Charming.

_”What is this?” Q hit keys, frustrated._

Wake up.

_”Looks like a message,” Bond said._

Come find me.

_“Any idea what it means?”_

Come rescue me.

_“No idea. My head… Q…”_

Wake up.


	2. Day Two

He didn’t recognize the bed he woke up in.

The room was a depressingly antiquated place. Four-poster bed from Victoria’s reign. Chairs and a side table from the Regency. Window-glass courtesy of the Tudor era. Tossing back the sheets (which almost certainly pre-dated Elizabeth II), Bond found himself stripped to his knickers, with his suit folded neatly on a chair nearby. 

He had no recollection of putting himself to bed, and was almost certain that he hadn’t (he would have stayed half-dressed if he expected to leave on short notice, and would have stripped to his skin if he didn’t). The last thing he remembered was a conversation with Q on fairy feasts. And then, what? Q had knocked him out and carried him up to bed? He’d claimed to have control over everything in his house. Maybe it wasn’t implausible.

Making his way down the stairs, feeling well-rested but paranoid, Bond found Q in the banquet room again, amidst a stack of books and papers spread across one end of the table.

“Oh, good morning,” Q said. He looked up, and then waved a hand toward the far end of the table, which promptly populated itself with fresh, hot breakfast foods, all of the options for a proper English breakfast, most of a Scottish, and a scattering of specialties of Yorkshire and Northumberland. 

Bond was ravenous. He kept Q’s warning in mind, but he was also aware that he needed to stay here long enough to break the spell, and he was going to have to eat eventually. Helping himself to some sausages and toast, he sat down across from Q and watched him. 

“How did you get here?” Bond asked, intending to get more answers this time.

Q didn’t look up from his papers. “You’ll recall I pointed out this is my house. I’ve always been here.” 

“How long is ‘always’?”

That earned him a look. “I’m thirty-two and human. I went to primary school in Hertfordshire and university at Oxford.” 

“How long ago did the thorns appear?”

Surprised fear flickered across Q’s face: he honestly didn’t know. “Months?”

“Weeks,” Bond corrected for him.

“Weeks.” Q set down the pen in his hand and dropped his face into his hands. “Is that all?”

“Who’s responsible for the curse?”

Q picked his pen back up, business again. “I can’t answer that.”

“How many other people are alive and active here, like the two of us?”

Q ignored him.

Bond kept trying. “What’s the point of the curse?”

That caught Q’s interest. He thought about it for a moment, face showing that he’d honestly not thought about it from that standpoint before. “The point of the curse? The purpose for which the curse was begun. I don’t know.”

“Do you know who’s responsible for it?”

Q didn’t answer. 

Fairy tales had rules. If Bond was right, there were questions Q couldn’t answer, which he stated accordingly, and other questions he didn’t want to answer, for unknown reasons. So Q did know who was responsible.

“Are you in danger?” Bond asked.

Q’s pen paused in its way across the page, and then resumed. No answer.

Reaching across the table, Bond took one of the pages. Latin.

_… our hands cannot reach out to touch them, therefore, being intangible, they cannot touch us either—touch, of course, being reciprocal._

It had been decades since he had been expected to make any sense of Latin. “Lucretius,” he said, after a pause. “Was he one of your sorcerers?”

Q’s head lifted in impressed surprise. “You should read _De Rerum Supernatura_. So how much more intelligent are you than you look, Mr. Bond?”

Feeling himself start to smile, Bond crossed his arms and did his best to remain stern. “Enough to suspect that you’re making up _’De Rerum Supernatura’_.”

Lips pursed in a not-quite-repressed smile, Q returned to his work without confirming that one way or the other.

“Your house is in the exact center of the ring of thorns. What’s the significance of that?”

“Good question,” Q commented.

“And yet I do think it is your house, and not you. The thorns don’t move accordingly when you move around in them.”

“Are you sure of that?” Q challenged.

“Do they?” Bond shot back at him.

Q held his gaze for a moment, then relented with another twitch of a smile. “No. You’re right. The house is the center.”

“Is this where it started?”

No reply.

“You said the thorns were here, once.”

“They came for me once, yes, and failed. They didn’t start here.”

That was almost the answer to what he’d asked. But it avoided the question of whether the curse had started here.

“Who am I here to rescue?”

Q went very still. 

No answer.

“There must be someone else. Someone started the curse, someone else needs rescuing, and you think someone is a threat to me. There has to be at least one other. Who? And where?”

“That’s not a good question to ask,” Q said, tense.

“Who.” Bond repeated, unrelenting.

Q glared at him. “Leave it.”

Bond met his gaze with cold determination. “Where.”

“I can’t answer your questions, Mr. Bond,” Q snapped.

If he kept pushing, he risked making Q (and his magical house) antagonistic. Even if he found a way to handle that, Bond wasn’t yet ready to press harder. There were still other options to explore before it would be necessary to torture the information out of him.

Bond stood up and left the room.

The house was far too large for one person living alone, but too small for ever having strategic or political significance. It was someone’s private residence, from the days of the Tudor kings. Bond couldn’t help but think that someone must have spent all of their time at court, instead of here. He couldn’t imagine it as sunny and charming, or surrounded by flower gardens. It was a place that only existed in gloom.

He explored room by room, taking stock of the place first on a strategic basis. There was always a chance that he would need to defend a room on short notice. A glance was enough to be certain of the strengths and weaknesses of a room, and then he went through it for hollow walls or secret passages. There were a few hidden doors, meant for servants access, but none of them were anything more complex than that.

It was dusty and empty throughout. Q only favored a few rooms, and the rest were left empty. On the ground floor, this was limited to the dining hall and, surprisingly, the kitchen. More papers cluttered the table here—latin and greek, primarily, with a few runes and some Chinese characters, along with some other languages that Bond didn’t recognize at all. After a moment, he understood why the kitchen was the second room that had Q’s favor. It was the warmest room in the house. The dining hall let him spread out his papers, but the kitchen was cozier.

The house was built around a courtyard. It might once have been a pleasant place, although Bond couldn’t imagine how. Any gardens were long gone. There was only a tangle of scraggly grass and a few weak bushes clinging to a wall. At the center was a warped and wizened tree, long since dead.

On the second floor, he found Q’s library—extensive and ancient, filled with a rare collection of leather-bound tomes, and more desks and tables overflowing with papers—Q’s sub-library—more modern, with paperbacks piled in towers, all of them non-fiction and reference books on the natural and magical world—and Q’s laboratory. The last was the most interesting.

Meticulously tidy, in contrast to the messy chaos of Q’s other rooms, the laboratory was filled with jars of strange and colorful ingredients. One entire glass case was rimed with frost, in some magical method of refrigeration. Dried herbs and plants hung from the ceiling, just within reach, and a pristine chemist’s set was lined up on the table, waiting. Bond touched a few things, curious, and wasn’t surprised when Q showed up quickly in the doorway, watching possessively as Bond touched his things.

“No respect of privacy?” Q asked, though he didn’t truly seem to expect any different.

“You want me to break the curse,” Bond stated. He picked up a jar of translucent blue-green shafts suspended in a clear gel, holding them up to the light. 

“Yes.”

“But you aren’t giving me any clues of where to start.”

“I haven’t got any.”

Bond set the jar back where he found it. “Then do you object to me finding them myself?”

Q sighed. “No. Will you at least be careful not to break anything?”

Bond didn’t bother answering that. He hadn’t broken anything yet. If he had to, he would.

After another minute spent watching him, Q went back downstairs.

There were four bedrooms on the upper floor. Two of them were empty, small, dark rooms in the middle of the corridor. The third was the one Bond had found himself in. Compared to the rest of the house, he was able to appreciate it as one of the best rooms—well lit and spacious, with attractive carvings throughout.

Q’s bedroom was the last, and the finest. Clearly the master bedroom, it occupied a corner on the front of the house, with windows that looked out across the empty moors. Bond let himself in without qualm, and began snooping about. The bed was clean but unmade—white sheets and a red coverlet in a tangle. Comfortably utilitarian, the room contained few personal items. There was Q’s clothing—the best of university chic; sweater-vests and tweed—and a scattering of what Bond’s movie-viewing education identified as minor magical artifacts. Nothing sentimental. No family photos or half-finished craft projects. 

Q also had nothing that connected him to the modern world. There were no electrical items of any sort in the entire house. It increased the sense of being outside of time. Bond could identify items throughout the house by era from 1490 through 1940, but there was nothing more recent than that. Even Q’s clothes could have been from the 1940s. There wasn’t a synthetic fabric among them.

“When were you born?” Bond asked, when he returned downstairs. 

“1980.” Q said, without missing a beat. He was playing with some sort of golden light that sparkled in the space between his fingertips.

“Where’s your mobile?”

“Mobile nothing. Where’s my _laptop_?” Q countered.

“Your laptop?”

“I wouldn’t say no to radio signal, either. There’s an old phone and a radio lying around somewhere, but all batteries are dead.”

So Q was conscious of the lack of technology in his house, and felt deprived by it. That was reassuring.

“What were you doing here, before the curse?”

“I live here.”

“Occupation?”

“I told you, I study magic.”

“Income?”

“I…” Q blinked. The light between his fingers vanished. “I don’t recall.”

“You started the curse,” Bond said.

Q looked up at him, face impassive.

“You study magic, and you happen to live dead center in the affected area. Intentionally or not, you’re the one who triggered the spell.”

Q held his gaze. 

An innocent man should have denied it, but Q’s “I can’t answer that” response complicated the issue. This might be an area that the spell didn’t allow him to deny. And yet, there was still some information that Q was intentionally withholding. 

“I keep finding myself inclined to trust you,” Bond commented. “And yet, every single time you find a way to kill it.”

Q didn’t even blink.

Shaking his head, Bond turned away and made another circuit of the room, making calculations in his mental layout of the house.

“Where’s the cellar access?” Bond said, at last.

There was no reply. When he looked over, he found that Q had returned to playing with his sparkling light.

“Q. Where’s the door to the cellar?”

“What cellar?” Q responded, without inflection.

“You know damn well what cellar,” Bond said, and left to find it himself. 

On his second lap through the place, Bond’s mental blueprint was detailed enough that he could find the discrepancy. A large wardrobe had been placed in front of the door to the cellar. When he pushed it aside, he found a solid wooden door. Flat, ice blue vines crept across the frame, forming a lattice like a net to keep the door shut tight. Q’s magic. He wanted Bond kept out of the cellar. Or wanted something else kept in.

_Come find me._

Bond went still, hand already half-reaching for the door. The voice in the fog from yesterday. And it wasn’t Q’s voice. 

There was another player in this game, someone else within the ring of thorns.

He touched the door. Vines dissolved under his hand, creeping back from him and disintegrating. He ran his hand down the wood of the door, watching the vines crumble at his touch. 

Not a very effective enchantment, apparently. 

Clasping the handle, Bond tugged. Vines strained around the edge of the door, snapping back and breaking off in rapid succession all around the frame. 

“Bond,” Q said, standing ten feet from him and staring intently at the door. The vines revived, tugging the door shut and snaking protectively over it. “Don’t.”

Pulling out his gun, Bond pointed it at him. He had a mission. If Q got in his way, Bond had no problem getting rid of him. “I’m willing to test my gun against your magic,” Bond said.

Q clenched his jaw. The vines on the door retreated.

Bond went into the cellar.

~

It was a complex old basement, amalgamated over the years into various uses. Dungeon, wine cellar, storage and pantry all overlapped. Most of it was empty now. Lonely old stone arches dripped quietly in the darkness.

Keeping his gun out, Bond cased the cellar, checking every corner for threat or clue. He hadn’t gone far when he found what he wanted.

“Have you come to see me?” a voice called, from deeper in the cellar.

Bond knew that voice. 

“Q?” it called. “Is that you? Come to gloat over your captive again?”

Silently, Bond moved forward, tracking the voice to another heavy closed door covered in enchanted vines. “Hello?”

“Oh,” the voice purred, sounding surprised and pleased. “It’s you. Have you come to rescue me?”

“Looks that way,” Bond said. He ran his hand over the door, clearing the vines and pulling back the latch. It swung open with a groan, revealing a small dungeon cell, with one blond man held captive within.

He’d found the someone who Q had tried to warn him about. There might be more than one, but this was the voice who had whispered to him in the fog. This was the man Q had chained up in his basement. Bond’s willingness to trust Q dwindled a little further.

“How did you do that?” the blond asked, fascinated. Bond stepped forward, touching the vine-wrapped chains around the captive’s wrists so that they fell away. 

“Oh.” The captive looked impressed. “You’re immune to his magic. Even here. Interesting.”

“Who are you?” Bond asked. 

“Call me Silva.” 

Pulling himself up primly, the prisoner rubbed at his wrists to return circulation to them. He moved with intent grace and an air of otherworldly beauty. Bond had the immediate and eerie illusion that where Q was a cloak of magic over a human core, Silva had a core of pure magic poured into a human shape.

“Why is he keeping you captive?”

“So that I won’t stop him.” Silva peered around, suspicious. “He stayed upstairs? He’s just letting you take me? Interesting. Is he up to something or is it that he’s frightened of you?”

“Stop him from doing what?”

“Destroying England.” Stating the threat unemphatically, Silva held out his hand. “Take my hand, please? If you’re immune to his magic, I should be also.”

Wary, Bond took the hand. Nothing happened. “Let’s go.”

“How did you get in?” Silva asked, following him out of the cell and up the stairs.

“Machete.”

“Just happened to be in the area and couldn’t resist a challenge?”

“I’m from MI6.”

“MI6?” Silva raised his eyebrows. It was hard to say if he was impressed. “One man, alone?”

“The thorns ate the helicopter they sent.”

“But the one man with the machete made it through just fine?” It almost sounded as though Silva was mocking him.

“Do you know how to break the curse?” Bond asked. He didn’t expect an answer, but at this point, asking questions was the only plan he had.

“Yes.”

Bond stopped short, staring at him.

Silva stared back. “Get me out of here and I’ll tell you.”

Accepting the deal, Bond pulled him forward.

They ran into Q in the entry hall.

“Bond,” Q said, a note of pleading in his voice. He stood his ground in the archway across the entry hall, keeping his distance. “ _Don’t_.”

Keeping hold of Silva’s hand, Bond stared him down. “Why not?”

“He’s dangerous. You can’t trust him.”

“I can’t trust you, either.”

Silva’s gaze flicked between them both, interested. “He really is immune to your magic, isn’t he? Why is that?”

Q glared at him. “Does yours work? Is that why he’s going with you?”

Reaching out, Silva brushed the back of his hand against Bond’s jaw. Bond frowned, but didn’t pull away.

“Doesn’t seem to,” Silva commented.

“I can’t protect you if you go with him,” Q said. “Please.”

“What’s your name?” Bond asked, testing.

Q’s gaze immediately shifted to Silva, as though the question was his. He didn’t answer.

“What caused the curse?” Bond tried, instead.

“Why don’t you ask him that?” Q snapped. The two magicians kept glaring at each other.

“I’d be happy to explain,” Silva said. “Once we’re somewhere safe.”

“There you have it,” Bond said. “That’s why we’re leaving.”

“Did you tell him your full name?” Q asked, attention returning to Bond.

Puzzled at the question, because he had told Q his full name when they met, Bond paused. “No. I didn’t.”

“Don’t.”

“I won’t,” Bond promised, quietly. He held Q’s gaze for a moment, eyes dropping once to his lips as he thought again about kissing him. 

“Mr. Bond,” Silva interrupted their moment. “Shall we?”

~

Q watched from the threshold of his house as they walked away. Bond looked back once, at the crest of the hill, to see that Q hadn’t moved. 

He kept hold of Silva’s hand. “Where are we going?”

“I know a place his power won’t reach.”

“He told me his power didn’t reach outside of the house.”

“I’m sure he told you a lot of things, Mr. Bond.”

“What caused the curse?” Bond prompted.

“Not yet,” Silva said. “Wait until we’re somewhere safe.”

“What are you? Why aren’t you caught in the thorns?”

“Magic comes naturally to me,” Silva said. “He needs that. He used my magic to cause all this. That’s why he kept me locked up.”

“And now that you’re not locked up?”

“Nothing changes. Not until you break the curse.”

“Until I break the curse? You can’t do it?”

“No. My magic isn’t enough to kill him, nor his to kill me. But you’re the exception, aren’t you?”

They went cross-country, into a wood. Silva raised a hand, and the branches parted for them, providing a narrow path for them to follow. The trees grew thin and scraggly near the edge, and grew in height and breadth as they went deeper, until the trees parted for a clearing, with a ring of standing stones at the center. 

“What is this place?” Bond asked. He touched one of the stones, as they entered the ring. The tallest of the stones reached about a foot above his head, while the smallest of them barely reached his knee.

“Sacred,” Silva said. He stretched out his arms and bracken flew from the forest. It collected in a pile at the center of the ring; beginning to smoke, then to burn. Pleased with himself, Silva sat down on a low stone within reach of the fire. “This place is very old. His power can’t touch us here.”

Bond came to sit nearby. “Tell me about the curse.”

“Q began this when he captured me,” Silva said. “He found out about my magic and trapped me, using my power to launch this spell. The spell binds us together. He can’t break it alone any more than I can, even if he wanted to.”

“What’s his goal?” Bond asked.

“Power. All humans have a certain level of innate magical power, even if they can’t access it themselves. He is drawing power out of all of the people he captures, which allows him to expand the thorns wider and catch more land and people within it, which increases his power again. You see.”

“Is that what you meant by ‘destroying England’?”

“Yes. All thorns and fog.”

“Right. How do I stop him?”

The firelight flickered on Silva’s face and hair, gilding the planes that it touched and leaving the others black. “His death will break the spell, but the spell is self-perpetuating. There is a loop, from Q to the tree to the thorns. You cannot kill him as long as he’s inside the thorns.”

“But there’s a loophole,” Bond prompted.

“Yes. There is an old tree at the center of his home, which is the center of the spell and the thorns. He used wood from the tree to create the spell.” Silva paused. He seemed to be testing Bond. “This is unpleasant.”

“I’m not squeamish.”

“You can only kill him if you use the tree to do it. Cut a stake from the tree. Drive it through his heart so that it pins him to the tree. That shortens the loop, from the tree to Q’s death. The thorns…” Silva made an expanding gesture with his hands. “Poof.”

“Kill him,” Bond repeated. He wasn’t sure he trusted Silva. He wasn’t sure he trusted either of them. “What happens to you, then?”

“I am free. Everything returns to normal. I go home, you go home.” 

Bond stared into the fire. He didn’t like the solution Silva offered, but it was the only one he had.

“Mr. Bond,” Silva said. His voice sounded very far away. 

“… Mr. Bond…”

 

_He woke up with a heartache. Q’s bed again. Maybe he had never left. He felt warm sunlight spilling over the sheets, staining the white coverlet with heat._

_“Q,” he whispered. It was almost a plea._

_Q rolled over and kissed him, laying comfortably against Bond’s chest. He looked the same as he ever did in the mornings. Gorgeously rumpled, with his hair lopsided and pillow-marks pressed into his cheek. His glasses were off, which made him squint intermittently. “Yes?”_

_“I can’t find you anywhere.” Bond wrapped his hands around Q’s waist and pulled him in. They were safe here, together, even though it wasn’t real. It felt real. Q felt warm and solid. His Q._

_They first met in a museum._

_A radio, a gun, a fear of flying. These things were real._

_“I know.” Q frowned, eyes shuttered with pain. He trembled within Bond’s arms—more of a flame’s flicker than a cathartic twitch—and felt thinner suddenly. Lighter. As if some of his substance had been shorn away. “I wish you’d hurry.”_

_“I’ve been hurrying,” Bond insisted. “You said it was me he was after. Silva. The hacker. You said everything he did was carving a path to me.”_

_“I didn’t take into account that I was always at your side.”_

_“He took you,” Bond said, heart sore. “He took you from me, and I don’t know where to look. I need you to help me find him. You’re the computer genius. You understand how he thinks.”_

_Q leaned down to kiss him again, lingering on his lips. The sheets of the bed felt cold. They were cold. They had always been cold._

_“Help me,” Bond said._

_“I’m trying. There’s not much I can do. I’m a captive, James.”_

_Trailing fingers down Q’s back, Bond held him close. Their bodies were warm, where they pressed together. It was the only warmth left in the bed. “Does it hurt, where you are?”_

_Q closed his eyes. “Yes.”_


	3. Day Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short update this time. Larger update next time.

It was twilight, again, when he woke.

His heart hurt, but he didn’t know why. If he had dreams while he slept, he didn’t remember them.

The fire still flickered, and Silva was sitting on the same stone, watching him sleep. It might have been mere minutes that he was out. Slept? Fainted? This place stole his concept of time, and he hadn’t gone to sleep any more willingly from his conversation with Silva than from his conversation with Q. At least this time it was less directly suspicious that Q had put him to sleep, unless he and Silva shared a penchant for the tactic. But they both claimed that their magic didn’t work on him. Which meant it was the place—the spell itself—knocking Bond out.

“Sleep well?” Silva asked, when he sat up.

“No.” Bond watched him, not comfortable with having been watched while he slept. He supposed there wasn’t much else that Silva could have done. There wasn’t a bedroom to move him to, like in Q’s house. “Do you know why that happens?”

“No. Has it happened more than once?”

“Do you sleep?” Bond asked.

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“Did you?”

“Less than you.”

“How long was I out?”

Silva made a moue that passed for a shrug. “Longer than I.”

Bond would have been irritated by the answer if he wasn’t aware of the complete lack of time within the curse. “Is it ever not twilight here?”

“Hm. No.”

“Why you?” Bond pressed. “Why did he target you for this?”

“I told you. Magic comes naturally to me.”

Silva wasn’t really much more helpful than Q, when it came down to it. Bond had the inclination to knock their heads together to see if it made the two of them any more talkative. He felt sick to death of asking questions.

Getting to his feet, Bond checked that gun and machete were still on him and in working order, then started walking back into the trees. 

“Mr. Bond!” Silva called, getting to his feet quickly. “Where are you going?”

“I’m here to break the curse,” Bond said, over his shoulder. “You told me how.”

~

He found Q in the kitchen, curled up on a chair by the table with legs crossed and barefoot. Q looked up in surprise at the sight of him, pulling his pen out of his mouth and staring. “You came back. Where’s Silva?”

“Somewhere safe, according to him. Get up. Come with me.”

“Where?” Q asked, getting his feet on the ground, possibly sensing that if he didn’t get up Bond was willing to drag him.

Grabbing him by the wrist, Bond did just that.

“Bond, please. Tell me what he told you. At least tell me we’re not leaving the house.”

“We’re not leaving the house.”

Hauling him into the courtyard, Bond walked up to the tree and stopped. “Tell me about this tree.”

Q _winced_ , turning his face away. “No.”

“Why not?”

Q stayed silent. 

Frustrated, Bond shoved him up against the wood of the tree. “Tell me _something_.”

Grimacing, Q didn’t try to fight. “Everything I can tell you, you already know. Yes, I knew he was there, yes, I locked him there intentionally.”

“He told me how to break the spell,” Bond said.

Jaw dropping, Q stared at him. Hope, fear and suspicion showed clear on his face.

“He said that you have to die.”

Q swallowed. They stared at each other for a beat.

“It’s possible,” Q admitted. “I don’t know how to break the spell. It might work, if I die. It might work, if he dies. All I know is that you can’t trust him.”

“I can’t trust you. Tell me what you’re hiding. Tell me what’s so special about this damn tree.”

Q shut his mouth and met Bond’s eyes with resolve. 

Bond knew that look very, very well. That was the look men got when they were prepared to be tortured before they would talk. He knew it well enough to be able to gauge how much it would take to break Q.

“Tell me who you are,” Bond tried.

Puzzled, Q shook his head. “My name? No.”

“I don’t care about your name. Where have I met you before?”

That made Q look completely confused. “What?”

Frustrated, Bond shoved away from him and headed out of the house.

He didn’t know which of them to trust. Both of them were keeping secrets, probably lying, and demonstrably powerful magicians. His gut told him to trust Q, and he’d felt from the start that Q was oddly familiar. But Q did everything in his power to undermine that trust. 

Q collected the bodies of the dead and posed them. Q lived at the center of the spell and held power over the house and—at least for a time—Silva. Q was the one who had been actively aware that Bond was going to black out before it happened, and might even have caused it. Q was the one with power. Q held all of the cards.

What was worse, he knew that his instincts in favor of Q were all kinds of biased. Q was his type—slender, clever, dangerous, teasingly flirtatious. The stir of interest in his gut every time he saw Q was a weakness. He wanted Q to be safe because he wanted Q in bed. Bond had plenty of experience knowing that ignoring that inclination would help keep him alive. Bedding people was easy. Trusting them got you killed. And if Q had half the power he seemed to, it was entirely possible that the sense of trust and sense of familiarity he had around Q were falsely implanted by some more of his weird magic.

His feet took him to the church.

He went instinctively, letting himself in and making his way to lean sacrilegiously against the altar at the front. It was only after he was inside that he thought he’d chosen this place because it was something like neutral ground. It belonged neither to Q, to Silva, nor to the thorns. It was the sanctuary of the non-magical victims of the region: Bond and the dead.

They slumped in their chairs, leaning against each other or with heads tipped back as if to snore, as if here had just concluded the most exhaustingly dull sermon in human memory. Cold, gray, and scentless, as if embalmed. 

The exhaustion was contagious. Bond slid down, leaning back against the altar, and slept.

 

_Q woke him with a kiss._

_Smiling at once, Bond hugged him close, tangling their legs beneath the sheets. “I always used to wake before you.”_

_“You were always paranoid,” Q replied. He gazed across the pillows between them, a smile tucked into his dimples._

_It was morning. There was sunlight._

_It was always morning. There was always sunlight. Bond’s head ached with something he felt sure he should remember._

_“I am still paranoid,” Bond said._

_“I know. You never trust anyone, do you?”_

_Bond reached out and brushed a curl out of Q’s eyes. Sweet, loyal, clever Q, with all his prim defenses fallen down for Bond._

_“No,” Bond agreed._

_He took his hand away, rolling onto his back and looking at the ceiling. “I am still having those dreams.”_

_“What dreams?”_

_“Thorns. Fog. The church of the dead.”_

_“James Bond has recurring dreams of a necrophiliac sleeping beauty. It’s a bit odd, even for you.”_

_“It’s especially odd, for me.”_

_The bed was cold. Bond reached for Q and held him close. It was a little warmer, that way._

_“Silva is in my dreams,” Bond said._

_Q’s mouth quirked playfully. He wasn’t taking this seriously. “In the sleeping beauty dreams? You haven’t kissed him, have you?”_

_“No. He’s not really my type.”_

_“Silva’s in my dreams, too,” Q said. He wasn’t smiling. Bond had been watching the whole time, but he hadn’t seen Q’s expression change. He wasn’t smiling, that was all._

_“I’m not sure yours are dreams.”_

_“No,” Q said. “By night, he locks me in a cell. It is dark and wet, and the metal of the floor has turned to rust that cuts my feet. His men come in. Sometimes with weapons, with tools, sometimes not. And then they leave again, and I sit in the utter dark and silence of the cell, amidst my own blood and the flakes of rust, and I dream about you. I think I might be going mad. I don’t know anymore. How do you tell if you’ve gone mad?”_

_“I’ll find you,” Bond promised. “Soon.”_


	4. Day Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter is dark and painful, and includes a torture scene and references to rape. Please see notes at the end for specific, spoilery warnings.

He was still in the church when he woke. 

Sense of time completely muddled, he sat up and looked around the silent pews. It might have been minutes, or hours. The light outside was the same fog-addled twilight as ever.

He felt certain that he had dreamed. There was a tingle in his brain, the hazy sense of urgency of a dream unfinished. In the dream, there had been something important he was meant to do.

His waking brain didn’t immediately recognize the addition to the congregation. There was a delay before his eyes caught on the blond anomaly in the second row. Silva. Sitting among the dead, he was still and quiet, waiting. 

“Hello, Mr. Bond.”

“I don’t suppose I’ve mentioned my aversion to being watched while I sleep?” Bond grumbled, getting to his feet.

Silva stayed seated, unruffled by the objection. “No. You hadn’t.”

Walking forward, Bond stopped by Silva’s pew. “What do you want?”

Keeping his eyes ahead, body relaxed and unconcerned, Silva made a thoughtful noise before continuing. “I thought you were going to break the curse.”

“I will.”

“Waiting for something special?”

“Waiting to be sure of my decision. Feel free to prove yourself innocent and trustworthy.”

Expression puzzled and a little bit hurt, Silva looked up. “I thought I had. You find me less trustworthy than the man who had me chained in his cellar?”

Yes. 

No.

“What isn’t he telling me?” Bond asked

“Quite a bit, I imagine, and lying about the rest.”

“Whereas you’ve been entirely honest?”

“Entirely.”

“I’ll break the curse,” Bond promised. “My way.”

“I look forward to seeing how that works out for you,” Silva remarked, turning his eyes forward again.

Irritated with both of them and the entire situation, Bond left Silva and went to find Q again. He had one possible solution, and no specific qualms about carrying it out. He just needed to be certain that it was the right solution. If Silva couldn’t be trusted, who knew what killing Q might do?

The only hope of an alternative he had left was in the information Q was keeping.

He found Q in the banquet room again, papers spread across the table. 

“Bond,” Q said, looking up in surprise.

“Tell me how the curse started.” Bond said, intending to get an answer this time.

Staring at him, Q’s mouth opened and then closed again, as he realized what the expression on Bond’s face meant for him. He bolted.

Bond caught him in the doorway, pinning him against the wall and lifting him an inch off the ground. “Tell me how the curse started.”

Q shook his head.

Dropping him, Bond delivered a rough backhand to his face. Q landed on his knees with a hurt, surprised noise. A red bruise blossomed instantly on his cheek, and faded just as quickly.

Lifting his eyes, like a hurt but loyal dog, Q braced his muscles and accepted this as inevitable. He wasn’t going to talk. Bond was perfectly willing to beat it out of him.

Each hit healed quickly. Skin knit and bruises faded within seconds. But they still hurt, and the healing hurt worse. Q suffered it with nothing more than the occasional whimper.

“How did you trigger the curse?” Bond asked. His hits had all been superficial so far, punches that took only seconds to heal. He could do worse, and they both knew it.

Q shook his head.

Bond broke a set of his ribs.

Hunched on the floor, curled in over himself, Q _screamed_ this time as he healed, bones knitting together with audible grinding noises. Bond kicked him again as the noises started to lessen, repeating the damage.

When Q stopped twitching this time, Bond waited. “Who is Silva?”

“Bond,” Q begged, curled up around himself on the floor. 

Part of Bond’s mind begged with him. _Don’t hurt him. It isn’t Q. He’s innocent. He has to be innocent._

Innocent, but not talking.

“Killing you is the only out I have right now,” Bond growled at him. “Give me a reason not to.”

Q shook his head.

Kicking him onto his back, Bond held him down with one booted foot and pulled his machete from its sheath, stabbing it down into Q’s gut.

Q convulsed around the knife, body struggling to heal but prevented by the machete pinned through him. 

“Why do you heal like this?” Bond demanded, pulling the knife up after a minute and letting Q shudder and repair, blood staining his shirt and the floor.

“Didn’t know I did,” Q gasped, turning his head to the side to cough blood. 

Bond placed his machete at Q’s throat, holding it there firmly for a moment. Silva had said that Q could only die with a stake from the tree. Bond was willing to test that theory. “Who is Silva?”

Miserable, Q met his eyes and held them.

Bond drove the machete down through Q’s throat.

Q’s body spasmed, eyes rolling up. Bond lifted the machete, watching Q’s body shake for a moment until Q rolled onto his side, coughing up gouts of blood and shivering. 

“Please,” Q whimpered.

“Talk.”

Q shuddered.

Rolling him onto his back again, Bond stabbed the machete through his shoulder, choosing it for the level of pain that would let Q talk but keep him in agony. And then he _waited_ , letting Q writhe and whimper with pain.

“I summoned him,” Q confessed at last. “Bond, _please_.”

Bond lifted the blade, waiting until his shoulder healed. “Summoned him.”

Curling onto his side again and hugging himself, Q nodded. “He’s a demon. I study magic. I found the spell. I thought I did everything right. I thought I could control him.”

“What happened?”

Lying in his own blood, Q shivered. “He… overpowered me. Trapped us both here. I don’t know how. I don’t know why.”

“Tell me about the tree.” 

Q spat blood again. “It’s the anchor for the spell. It was supposed to be the anchor for him. You could try burning the tree, but you’d have to get all of it, and that might just release him into the world. You could try killing him, but I doubt it’d work any better than killing me.”

“Why summon a demon in the first place?”

“Why would a doctor study poisons? I thought he was weaker. I thought he was under my control.”

Bond dropped to his knees by Q, lifting his chin to study his face. As Q started to break, he was revealing signs of psychological trauma entirely different from the new ones Bond was beating into him. There was pain there. That was why he didn’t want to talk. Something _hurt_ in him, bad enough that he’d chosen to accept the beating rather than face it. “What happened?”

Q winced and shut his eyes. “He overpowered me.”

_Raped him._ Bond took his hand away, standing and starting to pace. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like any of this, and he couldn’t trust his own senses or his own instincts. Q’s story made some sense, but it was complicated and contradictory. Silva’s story was straightforward and simple. In Bond’s experience, the straightforward answer was usually the right one.

“You had him prisoner in your cellar,” Bond pointed out. It was a very large hole in Q’s story.

“We’re both trapped inside the thorns. Have been for weeks. I tried a dozen ways to catch him before one worked. I tried even more ways to kill and banish him. None of those worked.”

Bond didn’t believe him. Q said he’d been overpowered, but he’d demonstrated vastly more power than Silva at every turn.

The part of Bond that wanted to trust Q ached.

He left Q on the floor to heal.

~

He found Silva back at the ring of stones, leaning back against one of them and playing a little set of pipes, the sort of which Bond had only ever seen in movies. 

There was blood on Bond’s cuffs. He tugged at them, wishing he had access to running water somewhere outside of Q’s house so that he could clean them off. But he’d left too quickly for that, walked straight out and left Q on the floor in his own blood, trusting that he would heal, again.

He dropped himself down on the ground across from Silva, glaring into space.

Silva lowered the pipes from his lips, taking in Bond’s appearance. “I notice the fog hasn’t lifted.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Bond growled, answering the unstated question.

Silva raised his eyebrows in comment.

“He said that you were a demon he summoned.” Bond prodded. He wanted answers.

“I prefer the term fairy,” Silva replied, setting the pipes down in his lap. “Demon is the christian word for anything that falls outside of their purview. So yes. And no. He summoned me, captured me. Tried to bind me to him as a slave, as magicians like to do. He told you he summoned me. What did he say he was going to do with me once he had me?”

Bond watched Silva’s face for hints that he was lying, and saw none. Q _hadn’t_ said why he wanted to summon a demon. He’d hinted that it was purely academic. Summoning demons on _purely academic_ motives seemed unbelievably stupid, and left his story in question.

Either they were both consummate actors, or they both fully believed the stories they were telling. It didn’t help Bond know who to trust or how to break the curse.

“No.”

“I resisted,” Silva continued. “I fought him, and he bound me more securely. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if I had agreed to serve him. He could have taken England more directly. Instead, we have this.”

“Why did he warn me not to tell you my name?”

Silva pursed his lips thoughtfully. “For the same reason he will not tell you his, nor will I tell you mine. Names have power. They allow you to control a person. He indicated that he knows yours, I think?”

“Yes.”

“That is bad for us. But interesting that he still cannot actively control you. You are the loophole, I think. It is why you are immune.”

“The loophole. He said the same thing.”

“Yes. This is fairy magic, that binds the three of us. Fairy spells always have a failsafe. Every spell has a loophole that allows it to be broken. Fairy spells want to be broken. It is tied to our sense of whimsy. We like curses that last for a hundred years and one. Not forever. Forever is boring. If you cannot be touched by the spell, then you are the one who is meant to break the spell. That is how it works. Every curse has one thing, one person, which is its perfect key. If you want to break the spell, Mr. Bond, ask yourself what only you can do. What is it that you are good at?”

Silva’s eyes dropped significantly to the blood on Bond’s cuffs. Bond had come here carrying a gun and a machete. His body was built to be a weapon, which was obvious at a glance, and he had just come from beating information out of Q.

All three of them knew what Bond was _good at_ was killing.

 

_“I can’t find you,” Bond said. “He’s had you for weeks now, and there’s nothing I can do. Every lead is a dead end. Every move I make, he’s already seen and prevented.”_

_Q smiled sadly at him across the pillows. His body was so cold now. There was barely any warmth left at all. Bond pulled him close, trying to share the heat, but it only felt as though it wicked away between their bodies._

_“Help me,” Bond said. “Some clue, some hint.”_

_“You need a trail of gingerbread crumbs leading you to me?” Q teased. His humor had gone the way of his body heat—only a weak flicker was left._

_“Where are you?”_

_“By night, the cell. By day… I don’t know which is worse.”_

_Bond’s heart ached. “By day?”_

_“By day he lets me out. Outside of the cell with the rusty floor is a room of plush white carpets. Every morning, they are pristine. Every morning, there’s a basin of hot water where I can wash, but I can never get all of the blood off. I leave trails of red on the white towels, and the white sheets of the bed. And then he comes to me.”_

_“Q,” Bond said. He didn’t want him to continue. He didn’t want to hear this._

_“If I fight, he has me tied down, and then he’s rough with me. If I obey; if I kneel and bow my head like he wants, then he’s gentle and sweet with me. He whispers that he wants me to enjoy it. He tells me that I belong to him.”_

_“You don’t,” Bond argued, but there was little he could do to change it until he found Q._

_“By day, if I’m good, there are trays of food and sweet wines. Sometimes he’ll even send in a servant to salve my wounds and massage the pain away.”_

_“Q,” Bond insisted, but Q didn’t react. He wasn’t even listening._

_“But even if I’m good, by night I go back in the cell.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Specific, spoilery warnings: Bond beats/tortures Q for the information he needs. It is graphic, but I’m a squeamish person and it’s about on par with the violence in the movies. Emotionally, the scene is written from within Bond’s head, wherein he is doing this because it is his job and he keeps himself emotionally distanced. In that scene, and again in the dream sequence at the end, it is very strongly hinted that Q has been/is being raped.


	5. Day Five

Bond woke up in the ring of stones. Silva wasn’t around.

He hated this. There were no questions left to ask, no stones left to turn. He’d exhausted all his options, and he still didn’t know what to do or how to break the curse.

There were so many pieces of the puzzle that he didn’t have. Every night he dreamed, and woke with a feeling of sick urgency. 

He’d tortured Q. He wanted Q. He wanted out of this trap. He wanted to see the sun again, or the stars. Even rain would be welcome. Anything but this eternal, miserable twilight and the threads of dried blood on his hands.

_Go on, Bond._ M had said. _See what you can do._

Fix it. Break the curse. Get it done.

Gathering his weapons, Bond went back to the center of the ring of thorns.

~

Q was in his room, curled up in bed with a book. He looked sleepy and warm, in ivory pyjamas and rumpled hair. All of his injuries had healed without a mark, as if yesterday hadn’t happened. He looked up at the sight of Bond in the doorframe, eyes immediately darkening with fear. Not of Bond himself, but of what Bond was going to do.

“It’s time,” Bond said.

They’d run out of ways to put this off, and now they’d come to the inevitable. The curse had to break. The witch had to die.

Closing his book and setting it aside, Q stood and walked over to him. He was barefoot, and his pyjamas were thin silk. It made him look young and vulnerable, and Bond wanted to tuck him in and keep him safe from the world. Except that Q was a dangerous, powerful sorcerer, and Bond had no reason to trust him. The feelings he had toward Q might easily be false, implanted by the power given Q by knowing Bond’s name. Bond had to follow his brain on this, not his heart. 

His brain told him that Q was less trustworthy, and therefore Q was the one who needed to die.

“Don’t do this,” Q said. His voice was quiet, but steady. He wasn’t pleading for his life, he was trying to reason. “He’s evil. If this is what he wants, there must be some horrible catch to it.”

“Do you have a better solution?” Bond asked.

Q held his eyes, brave and calm despite his fear. He shook his head.

Bond stepped aside and indicated for Q to precede him out of the room.

Q walked downstairs without hesitation, stepping barefoot into the weed-choked courtyard and walking up to the tree. He touched the bark of it sadly before turning to look at Bond. “I never did get that kiss,” he said, with a heartbroken smile. 

It was little enough to ask for, as a last request. Bond stepped close, lifting Q’s chin with one hand and taking a single warm, chaste kiss.

When it broke, Q’s eyes flicked to the sky, as if he’d somehow hoped that would work, and that the spell would release. It didn’t.

Bond let go of him, cutting a branch from the tree and using his machete to sharpen it into a stake. Q watched, leaning back against the tree with terrified resignation. 

“I thought he’d come,” Q said. “To watch. In the end.”

Bond tested the point of the stake with his thumb, keeping his eyes away from Q. His brave acceptance of his execution made this harder. If he had fought or begged, Bond would have had an easier time divorcing himself from the situation. Instead, he couldn’t help but admire Q’s quiet determination to die bravely.

“At least it will be over,” Q said. “No matter what happens. We’ll be out.”

Standing in front of him, trapping him against the tree, Bond met his eyes. “Are you ready?”

Q nodded.

Rubbing his thumb over Q’s shirt, Bond found the spot he wanted—up under the ribcage, and through the heart. It was a delicate task, getting just the right angle, and a wooden stake wasn’t the best choice of weapon. 

His own heart pounded in his chest, begging him to stop. If he’d lost fewer loves, over the years, maybe he would have. But all the dead women (and sometimes men) in his wake had hardened his heart against it. When it came to a choice between love and doing his job, he would choose the job every time.

Their eyes met, and held. Bond shoved the stake through his heart.

It was a clean strike. Q’s eyes darkened with pain, and then his chin dropped and they closed. 

Bond took a step back, hands and suit covered with Q’s blood. Q stayed up against the tree, slumped back against it with his head fallen forward, as his blood poured out of his chest and puddled around the roots of the tree.

This time he stayed dead.

The sky opened, tearing apart the fog to boil forth with clouds and lightning.

Bond’s heart clenched. Leaving Q alone by the tree, he ran through the house to the front door. 

All the world was in tumult. The sky above roiled black with clouds, while on the horizon, the thorns grew rampant, shot through with malevolent wisps of fog.

He’d chosen wrong.

_It’s a fairy tale_ , they had told him, again and again. In a fairy tale, you were always supposed to follow your heart.

Bond pulled out his gun, holding it in front of him despite the lack of any visible foe. “ _Silva!_ ” he called. Nothing but the wind answered him, and the thorns on the horizon which grew boundlessly, closing in quickly on the house. 

“Silva!” he called again.

A tangle of thorns erupted from the ground in front of him. Bond wasted a bullet on them, to no avail.

“Very good, Mr. Bond.” Silva said, stepping out of the protective embrace of the thorns. “Very good.”

Bond took another shot, aim flawless. The bullet stopped an inch from Silva’s head, and dropped harmlessly to the ground.

Silva tsked. “So quick to change your loyalties, Mr. Bond. I thought you were on my side.”

“I thought you were telling the truth,” Bond countered.

“I may have embroidered a bit. Q dies, spell breaks, I go free. England is mine now, Mr. Bond.”

Bond took another useless shot to show what he thought of that.

Silva pouted at the insult. “So temperamental. You have given me an incredible gift, Mr. Bond. I’m feeling grateful. I could spare you. Let you rule at my side. We could have all of England for the taking.”

“Not interested.” Bond kept his gun up, useless as it was.

“Pity,” Silva said. 

The thorns rushed up.

Dropping back through the door, Bond slammed it and pushed the bolt. Doors and windows hadn’t prevented the thorns from entering any other house he’d seen, but Q had said that his house was safe. Bond had to hope that was still true.

Even if it was, he was trapped and powerless. A gun and a machete. Even Q hadn’t been able to control Silva, and he had spent years building up magical power. 

And now Q was dead at Bond’s hand. 

Making his way back to the courtyard, Bond tucked his gun away and gathered Q’s body into his arms, sinking to the ground with him. Carefully, he pulled out the stake, letting the bloody thing fall aside.

“Heal,” he whispered. “Please heal.”

Cold and dead in his arms, Q didn’t respond. His body didn’t stir.

“My mother used to read me fairy tales,” Bond said, quiet and hopeless. “Long ago. Some of my earliest memories are being held on her lap, listening to stories. She loved fairy tales, even the oldest ones. Those ones were bloody and horrible. Not like the Disney versions. People died. Princesses were raped. Those are the fairy tales I remember. But even in those ones, they always ended the way they were supposed to. Not like this.”

He touched Q’s cheek, leaving bloody streaks on the pale skin. “Please,” he begged. “Come back.”

And then he leaned down for a kiss. 

Q’s lips were cold, but they warmed under his touch. Q’s body convulsed, arms clutching at him, and he gasped and whimpered as the healing aspect of the spell dug its claws into him and put him back together. 

When he stopped twitching, the two of them were hugged tight together, hearts pounding in unison.

“Bond,” Q said, a few last shudders spilling through him.

“I thought I’d killed you,” Bond said. 

“You did.” Q coughed, slowly relaxing his grip. “What happened?”

“The thorns are all around the house. We’re trapped, and Silva is free and has all of England for the taking.”

“I have no more power than I did before, Bond. I can’t push back the thorns. All I can do is keep them out of the house.” 

Trying to think, Bond got to his feet, pulling Q up with him. 

“Summon him,” Bond said, on a whim.

Q kept his arms hugged around Bond’s waist. “Summon him?”

“You summoned him before, and you trapped him before. Can you do it again?”

“Maybe. Not for long, if at all. You’ve broken my connection to him. I can’t hold him.”

“Have any better ideas?”

Q gave him a lopsided smile. “No. It’s worth a try.”

“Do it.”

~

It took far too long.

The house groaned and strained around them as the thorns grew and tightened in a close ring around the stone manor. Q worked quickly, fetching ingredients and building his spell, but it still took ages. Q’s spells kept the thorns back for a time, but they grew up over the house, blotting out the sky in a thick tangle of black vines, so that all the light that remained came from Q’s candles set in a circle around the tree. And then the thorns began to creep down, into the courtyard. When they reached the ground level, Bond fought them back with a machete, keeping one door clear as the vines blocked the other doors and the windows. 

“Bond,” Q said, voice quiet with fear and desperation as he turned to go back inside but the door was already blocked, vines growing thicker than Bond could clear them.

“Too late,” Bond said. “Do it. Whatever you can. Do it.”

Q cast the spell.

Retreating back from the thorns, Bond stood by his side on the edge of the circle, ready to die defending him if it would buy Q a few more minutes to cast the spell. 

“Hello boys,” Silva said, appearing in a burst of thorns in the center of the circle.

Bond reached out, putting his gun into Q’s hands. “Can you shoot?”

“This is a little bit sad,” Silva said, mocking. “Your little gun won’t work on me.”

Q lifted it, courage making up for lack of experience, and pulled the trigger. The bullet didn’t even touch Silva before dropping uselessly to the ground within the circle.

“Too late, boys,” Silva said, smiling with fake sympathy as he raised his arm and the thorns followed.

Bond stepped behind Q, winding one arm around his waist and lifting the gun with the other, his hand over Q’s. Both of them had been immune to Silva’s spells, in their own way. But to break those spells, it required both of them. “Again,” he said, holding the aim steady.

Q fired.

It struck Silva through the eye, black blood and white ichor spilling from the wound as his face warped with surprise. Bond lowered the gun slightly, and Q fired again, the second bullet taking him through the heart.

Suspended in the air by the thorns that had been formed a shell around him, Silva fell back, crumbling like dead leaves and dissolving away.

Bond kept his hold on Q, watching as the thorns all around them began to shrivel and crumble into dust, retreating back from the house and vanishing. 

“We did it,” Q whispered, lifting his head to see as the clouds above thinned, letting the blue sky peek through.

Bond laughed softly, tucking away the gun and hugging him warmly. “Happy ending?”

Turning in his arms, Q hugged him back, lifting his head for a kiss. “Like any good fairy tale.”

 

_“James.”_

_That was all the warning he got before Q’s body hit him, bouncing onto the bed and stealing a kiss. He was warm and heavy against Bond’s chest, tangling the covers between him._

_“You’re back,” Bond said, unable to keep from grinning. He hugged Q close to him, rolling him onto his back to trap Q beneath his body, keeping him safe and warm._

_“I’m back,” Q confirmed. “You saved me. Saved the world. As usual.”_

_“I don’t know about the world. The world can usually take care of itself. You and England are the ones who can’t keep out of trouble.”_

_“M is pleased,” Q said. “I spoke to him. He sounded pleased.”_

_“And you?” Bond asked. “Are you hurt?”_

_Q closed his eyes, hugging a little bit closer. “We’re both hurt, James. This life damages us. It’s in the job description.”_

_“Not this,” Bond argued._

_Q laughed. “You didn’t read the fine print.”_

_Tightening his arms around Q, he pressed his face into Q’s throat and breathed him in. “I’m not letting you out of this bed again. It isn’t safe.”_

_“Not in any hurry to leave,” Q replied, lifting Bond’s head for another kiss._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! If you like my work, consider following me on tumblr (marlowe-tops) for updates, scrap fiction, and the best way to contact me. :)


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